4-5:00pm: "U & S: Updike Reads Shakespeare"
In a prequel to John Updike's appearance on
campus on April 13, Dr. Dan Traister, Curator of Research
Services at the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library will present a
talk about Updike and Shakespeare on Tuesday, April 4 at 4 p.m. at the
Kelly Writers House.
DR. DANIEL TRAISTER is an English-language literature bibliographer in
Van Pelt-Dietrich Library and curator for research services in the Walter
H. and Leonore Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the sixth
floor of Penn's main library. He holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance English
literature from NYU and a master's degree in library service from
Columbia University, where he concentrated on rare book and manuscript
librarianship. Before coming to Penn in 1982, he was curator for special
collections at Lehigh University, and he worked as a librarian in the
Rare Book Division of The New York Public Library.
An adjunct faculty member, Dr. Traister frequently teaches courses at the
University of Pennsylvania on English and American literature and on the
history of books and printing. He also teaches courses on pedagogy and
on rare book librarianship at the Rare Book School at the University of
Virginia. He has written articles on literature, bibliography, history,
rare book librarianship, and library collection development in scholarly
and professional publications. A voracious reader and avid acquirer of
books, he is the program chair for the Philobiblon Club, an association
of Philadelphia area book collectors and book lovers.

Both STEVE MCCAFFERY and JED RASULA are well-known poets, important
critics, and the anthology is a fabulous collection of the most remarkable
language experiments of the last millennium, from Jacob Boehme to Gertrude
Stein to Ronald Johnson, juxtaposing elegant lettristic crystallographies
and kabbalistic unravelings of the Word with a great variety of
Revolutions of the Word and pataphysical jacqueries. McCaffery is the
author of numerous books, including *The Cheat of Words* (ECW Press), *The
Black Debt* (Nightwood Editions), *North of Intention* (Roof), and
*Panopticon* (Blewointmentpress). Rasula's books include *Tabula Rasula*
(Station Hill) and *The American Poetry Wax Museum : Reality Effects,
1940-1990* (Refiguring English Studies).

Speakeasy: Poetry, Prose and Anything Goes, an open mic
performance night. NOTE! Speakeasy will take place tonight at the
Castle, 36th and Locust, at 9:30pm, as part of a coffeehouse benefit for
Take Back the Night. There's a $5 cover charge, and there will be
other performances as well. Check it out!

7:00 PM: The Kelly Writers House Fellows program presents Robert
Creeley
Robert Creeley is among the most accomplished and most influential living
poets. He was born in Massachusetts in 1926 and as a young poet after WWII
was strongly swayed by William Carlos Williams, who later praised Creeley
has having "the subtlest feeling for the measure...except in the verses
of
Ezra Pound." Creeley helped launch Cid Corman's magazine
Origin, conducted
a huge and profound correspondence with Charles Olson, and soon joined
Olson at Black Mountain College where he edited The Black Mountain
Review.
Olson admired how Creeley "lands syntax down the alley." His collections
of poems include For Love (1962); Words (1967);
Pieces (1969); The Finger
(1970); A Day Book (1972); Thirty Things (1974); Away
(1976); Later
(1978); Memory Gardens (1986); Windows (1990). The
Collected Poems,
1945-75 was published in 1983; So There: Poems
1976-83 appeared in 1998.
He has lived in Guatemala, Finland, France and Spain, and served with the
American Field Service in India and Burma. He was awarded the Horst
Bienek Lyrikpreis from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, two Guggenheim
Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, and, among many other honors, was New
York State Laureate from 1989-91. He is a member of The American Academy
of Arts and Letters and lives in Buffalo, New York. Edward Dorn praised
Creeley as "the master of immediate speech," while Allen Ginsberg revered
Creeley's "syllable by syllable intelligence." Robert Creeley held the
Poetics Chair at SUNY Buffalo, prior to Charles Bernstein.
Recordings of this event that have been made available as part of the PENNsound project can be
found here and
here.

6:00 PM in Room 202: The Hollywood Club hosts a conversation with John
Hurwitz, a Wharton senior who recently sold a script to MGM, to speak
about the process and development of screenwriting

7:00 PM: Richard Sieburth, hosted by French Institute for
Culture and TechnologyRichard Sieburth teaches French and Comparative Literature at New
York University. He previous translations include Friedrich Holderlin's
Hymns and Fragments, Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary, Michel
Leris's Nights as Day, as well as texts by Blanchot, Michaux,
Artaud and Roubaud. He is also the author Instigations: Ezra Pound and
Remy de Gourmont and editor of Pound's Walking Tour in Southern
France. He is currently preparing a translation of Maurice Sceve's
Delie.

The Dean's Forum presents John
Updike. Mr. Updike will visit Writers House for a 11am-noon
webcast interview with novelist Lorene Cary, followed by
a buffet lunch. He will be give a public presentation at 4:30pm in
Logan Hall, Room 17. For more information, click here
JOHN UPDIKE is the great contemporary chronicler of the American middle
class. He is the master of four genres: novel, short story, poetry, and
essay. In each, he employs his exquisitely lyrical style and remarkable
intellectual engagement with America's moral and spiritual problems to
probe the inner lives of families and the mundane concerns with husband,
wife, child, home and job. The author of numerous best-selling books,
Updike has built a popular reputation on his work as a novelist. In his
celebrated tetralogy about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom,, he created on of
the immortal characters of American literature.
John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, PA. He was an English
major at Harvard and editor of the Lampoon. The New Yorker published
his first professional story in 1954 and continues to publish his poems,
stories, essays, and reviews. In his most recent novel, Gertrude and
Claudius, an imagined prequel to Shakespeare's Hamlet, Updike takes
everything he has learned he has learned about modern familial
dysfunction and masterfully applies it to Elsinore Castle. "The book,"
says Richard Eder of The New York Times, "illuminates questions about
Shakespeare, about what a classic means and also the unexplored hills
and forests that lie on either side of the path art pushes through
then."

4:30 PM in Room 202: Twentieth Century Reading Group

6:00 PM: PhillyTalks: a reading and dialogue
between
poets Sianne Ngai and Abigail Child, with dinner to
follow.
RSVP for dinner to wh@writing.upenn.edu.Sianne Ngai is a poet and critic, and the author of criteria
(O
Books),
Discredit (Burning Deck), and My Novel (Leave Books). Her
critical
writings on contemporary poetry have appeared in Postmodern Culture,
Open Letter, and The Poetry Project Newsletter (a review of
Juliana
Spahr's Response). Her essay "Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust" is also
forthcoming in Tell It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s, an
anthology edited by Mark Wallace and Steven Marks. Recent poetic work
can be found in Object, edited by Rob Fitterman, Xcp
(Cross-Cultural
Poetics), edited by Mark Nowak, and a collaboration with Brian Kim
Stefans in Interlope, edited by Summi Kaipa. She lives in
Brooklyn,
NYC.Abigail Child is the author of several poetry books, including A
Motive for Mayhem (Potes & Poets, 1989), Mob (O Books, c.
1995), and Scatter Matrix (Roof, 1996), as well as essays on
contemporary theory in its relation to poetry and film that have
appeared in journals including Poetics Journal and Raddle
Moon. She is
also an award-winning film- and videomaker who has exhibited her work
extensively including the Whitney Biennial, the New York Film
Festival, and the London Film Festival. She lives in New York City.

9:30am -- 5:00pm: This one-day conference
and roundtable will specifically question the application of language to
visual imagery. Of particular interest are the techniques by which we
invent a specific language to represent abstract imagery. Participants
include Alex Baker, Gregory Flaxman, Rayna Kalas, Aaron
Levy, Jean-Michel Rabate, and Bernard Stehle.

6:00 PM: The Gay Talese Lecture Series presents Jay Parini,
"On Poetry, Prose, and Italy,"
at the Kelly Writers House, sponsored by the National Italian American
Foundation.
Jay Parini was born in 1948 in the anthracite mining country of
northeastern Pennsylvania. He graduated from Lafayette College in 1970,
then got his PhD at St. Andrews in Scotland. While a graduate student in
Scotland he published his first book of poems, Singing in Time
(1972). Since 1972 Parini has published fourteen books, including
biographies of Theodore Roethke, Gore Vidal, John Steinbeck and Robert
Frost, four books of poems (the latest is House of Days), and five
novels. Parini is also the co-founder of New England Review. He
is the Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College. He is married
to Devon Jersild, a writer, and has three sons.
He lives in Weybridge, Vermont.